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Life in front of the camera and behind the scenes at a This Old House renovation.

This Was Their Life's Work - Jackie Rebholz

June 2013 - Mantoloking,NJ

(Picture: Jackie Rebolz and her children watch as her parents' home of thirty years is demolished and removed from the bay.)

Natural disasters like Sandy cause some strange situations,
and I saw plenty of them when I got to the Jersey Shore. There was the broken
house sitting on top of a two-ton army truck, and there was the 100-foot-high roller
coaster sitting in the ocean so perfectly intact it looked like a dozen
screaming teenagers had just given it a ride.

And strange situations lead to strange questions like the
one asked by Jackie Rebholz about her family home – “How do you take a house
out of a bay?” For thirty years her parent’s home sat on the small finger of
land between Barnegat Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in the borough of Mantoloking.
When Sandy hit and the barrier island was breached, Jackie’s house was washed
off terra firma and into the bay. And there it sat for eight months, eerily
intact just like that roller coaster, standing not so firm and raising many
strange questions.

(Picture: The house was washed into the bay during Superstorm Sandy and sat there for eight months before it was finally torn down and carted away via barge.)

Natural disasters also lead to some strange emotions.
There’s fear of course, some anger, a sense of loss no doubt and on darker days
maybe even a sense of hopelessness. But to my surprise, even on the darkest day
one can feel a “sense of relief” – so Jackie told me as we watched a crew tear
down her family home, taking it from the bay and from her family forever.

We'll feature a video showing Jackie's story—and more like hers—in the weeks to come, before the premiere of the new season of This Old House.

(If
you have any comments or questions, you can find Kevin on Twitter or Facebook )